the other half?

iDevGames - "Mac Games Begin Here!" - a community devoted soley to the growth and entertainment of macintosh video game developers. Since iDevGames has opened it seems to have spawn a great deal of followers, enouraged the development of many original titles, and in fact brought a range of talent to a single source with a common interest - an effort that should be applauded.

The forum on iDevGames currently lists 344 registered members, with around 20 listed cruising the site everytime I visit the homepage. The community here just seems to keep growing and expanding every day, but are we missing out on something? I believe we're all becoming witness to what iDevGames has been losing out on, and now it's time to think about the other half of game development might be neglecting.

At this time it's important to fire up that a powerpoint presentation in your head to space out the significant roles in the development of a video game. Many of those roles can be simplified and handled by the people iDevGames seems to cater to and flourish with, programmers. One role that is very much significant though is the artist. Granted many programmers take on this role themselves and don't mind they are very much an integrate role in the very process. A talented artist can very well separate a home grown toy to something sold on store selves. With the amount of power they can hold for us as programmers it's only logical to give them a feeling of desire....so where are they all? From the activity on the forum and from personal relations it seems iDevGames has seemingly become iProgramGames.

I offer up a few questions for discussion on the very balance of people at iDevGames.

Are we doing enough to cater toward and encourage the growth and development of young artists?

Is this really okay as a community? Based on how a game is constructed I'd want to believe around 1/3 of the people here work mostly in Blender (or some alternative) and Photoshop (again, or other alternative) for their needs.

Now maybe I'm not aware of the interests and abilities of all 344 forum members, but I think this is an important issue for the community to flourish. Are we doing enough?

(ps, my old user account, deekpyro, was hosed not long ago and I was unable to even login, so I created this one)

Your post rings true. There should be something for artists. Have artists develope their skills on the Mac for games. However should that be another web site, or something which can be rolled in to iDG. Is there a member of the forums who so strongly agrees with it that they would lead that project?

Ideally, we would have a good mix of coders, artists and musicians (and 1 or 2 game designers ).

How to attract artists and musicians?
* hold small art/music contests for them
* visit the forums that they do, and encourage them to come here
* don't blast them when they do come here

About the 3rd point, all too often, I see someone come here with no coding skills but with another skill. They post they want to make a game. Many times 80% of the posts are like this "We programmers have our own games, why don't you learn to program and make it yourself."

For some people, like "Chopter", that worked out, but many of them vanish. We need to be careful of that.

I see so much great pixel art, but it often isn't used for a game -- just made for fun. What a shame! They could be colloborating and getting some fame and $$ if they did. I have a feeling that many don't even think that their icon making skills would be perfect for sprite creation.

Anyhow, I would do more, but as many of you know, I'm already overstretched and haven't had a real Assistant Editor in years.

I'm currently developing what I hope will eventually end up a reasonably pro-level 3D modeling/animation application. I am planning to distribute it free of charge when its complete. The lack of good game development tools has been discussed here several times in the past and I finally figured I'd sit down and do something about it a few months ago. I'm targeting low to mid level polygonal models that can be animated and exported in a variety of formats (.obj, .md2, .3ds, etc) and was hoping to include a set of sample loading code for each of those formats similar to the obj loader I've already released.

I would think that having a nice suite of software at home here on iDevGames would go a long way towards attracting more artistic talents. I know that someone else was working on a pixel editor, which would certainly go a long way towards that end. Ideally, users would visit the forums to check for the latest releases, and thus would also use the forums as a community support group.

Its custom built; been slowly working on it specifically for this modeler. It's themeable, and reasonably cross platform though I've let the GLUT base code stagnate a bit (currently using carbon/agl). It has its problems though (already), I have to clean up the api quite a bit at some point, didn't plan it out properly; and there are some redraw efficiency problems I have to work on.

Apples wonderfully unpredictable gl drivers make for some interesting corruption effects every now and then on systems with low vram, especially after waking from a screensaver. It would be nice if something could be done about that.

Before the crashes I had started a thread with an idea for an artist contest: present a highly skinnable game, artists would submit skins for it, and the entries would be judged. We had even postulated that Hooptie could be the game in question. (Or, we could have a separate 21-days-type contest where the challenge would be to produce a highly skinnable game?) Prizes and voting were open questions. Never really got a count of how many people would have entered either.

Anyway, I have absolutely no free time at the moment to push such a contest to fruition so all I can do is suggest it again.

kberg Wrote:I'm currently developing what I hope will eventually end up a reasonably pro-level 3D modeling/animation application. I am planning to distribute it free of charge when its complete. The lack of good game development tools has been discussed here several times in the past and I finally figured I'd sit down and do something about it a few months ago. I'm targeting low to mid level polygonal models that can be animated and exported in a variety of formats (.obj, .md2, .3ds, etc) and was hoping to include a set of sample loading code for each of those formats similar to the obj loader I've already released.

Back to the topic, I think we are more "programmers" than "artists" because, even though for a game you need both, we enjoy more coding, and take the graphics part more as a "necessary pain" (at least this is for me)

ThemsAllTook Wrote:Whoa, awesome! This is exactly what I've been looking for. Any chance there'll be a version released in time to be used for uDevGames? I'd love to use it to create my game models...
Alex Diener

uDG '04 was originally a milestore I had set for myself. I did want to have at least a partially usable version ready in time for it to be of use for the competition. Life, as usual, has made that difficult though . August will be the next period where I can sit down and spend more then an hour or two without having to neglect other things. As I get the time, I will focus on the most important feature additions though; stuff like saving a mesh.

Your pixel editor will be a great addition to any artists tool box, photoshop is far too complex (and expensive!) for most of the amateur artists I know.